Marguerite Taos Amrouche

Marguerite Taos Amrouche (born March 4, 1913, Tunis—died April 2, 1976, Saint-Michel-l’Observatoire, Fr.) was a Kabyle singer and writer.

Amrouche was the daughter of Fadhma Aïth Mansour Amrouche; she was the only sister in a family of six sons and was born after the family had moved to Tunisia to escape persecution after their conversion to Roman Catholicism. Despite this exile, both she and her brother Jean returned to Algeria for extended visits. Through her mother’s influence she became interested in the rich oral traditions of the Kabyle Berber people. In 1934 she obtained her brevet supérieur in Tunis, and in the following year she went to France for studies at the École Normale at Sèvres. She worked briefly as an assistant at a boarding school in Radès. Starting in 1936, in collaboration with Jean and her mother, Amrouche collected and began to interpret Kabyle songs. In 1937–38 she presented her repertoire in Paris and in Munich. At the Congrès de Chant de Fès in 1939 she received a scholarship to study at the Casa Velasquez in Spain, where she researched the ties between Berber and Spanish popular songs.

Amrouche’s first novel, Jacinthe noire (1947; “Black Hyacinth”), recounts the story of an “uncivilized” young Tunisian girl who is sent to a French pension for studies. Differences in life-style, attitudes, and experiences set her apart, and exile, prejudice, and rupture are themes of the novel, which is one of the earliest ever published in French by a North African woman writer. A second novel, Rue des tambourins (1960; “Street of the Tabors”), describes a sense of marginality and owes a great deal to its author’s recollections of her childhood in Tunis.

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Le Grain magique (1966; “The Magic Grain”)—a collection of legends, short stories, songs, poems, and proverbs from the Kabyle, translated by her from Berber into French—is perhaps her best-known work. She recorded several phonograph albums and produced a number of programs for French radio and television, including Chants sauvés de l’oubli (“Songs Saved from Oblivion”) and Hommage au chant profond (“Homage to a Profound Song”).